


The Whole World is Moving and I’m Standing Still

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Felicity finds out, No Spoilers, post-4x13 fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 19:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6021825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little spec about what might happen when Felicity finds out about William. </p><p>Post-4x13, no spoilers. Olicity angst feat. Barry Allen in his role as worst supporting liar.</p><p>"Inside them both is a nine-year-old who can’t think of anything they wouldn’t give to have their father back."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Whole World is Moving and I’m Standing Still

_Title from “[The World Spins Madly On](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DL4sa2HoXpsE&t=ODI2MjJkZjU2NjVhOWZiM2NkMWNiYTkzYmY5MTU3NTQxMGM4NDkzMyxqaFJtUTFKNA%3D%3D)” by The Weepies._

**The Whole World is Moving and I’m Standing Still**

Oliver’s back on Lian Yu when she figures it out.

He’s tracking down the key to some ancient magical cure, they’ve finally pieced together bits of a puzzle he started collecting five years ago, and he has himself absolutely convinced that the key to making Felicity walk again can only be found six feet under and six thousand miles to the west, in his own personal purgatory.

If it works…she hasn’t allowed herself to really consider that as a possibility. It’s so dangerous to hope. And still, the idea of him going back to that place was almost enough for her to ask him to stay. But he can’t, they know that just as well as they know that she can’t go with him this time.

So Oliver’s a half a world away when she figures it out, when a threat from Damien Darhk links up to a virtual data dump from The Calculator, when she sees the long-range photographs and the birth certificate. 

In fact, she’s entirely alone, diving into some Green Arrow business in the Palmer Tech lab while Curtis takes his lunch break. 

When she remembers to breathe again, she’s already in the elevator. With shaking hands, she calls for a car, gives the driver their address. Then…

“Actually, can you just take me to the train station?”

* * *

Barry answers his phone on the second ring.

“Felicity?” What sounds like a sniffle echoes on the other end, and he snaps his fingers at Cisco on instinct, pointing at his phone. _“Trace the call.”_

 _“I’m at the Central City train station.”_ She clears her throat after she speaks. There’s a tiny tremble in her voice, something’s not right, but the knot in his chest loosens a little when he’s fairly certain she’s not in imminent danger. Oliver had given his customary heads-up to the S.T.A.R. Labs team when he left for the island, yet another secret responsibility he had foisted onto Barry without asking. _“I’m not wheeling myself to you, Barry Allen, get here in five minutes.”_

“Huh?”

The line deadens, leaving him with just one option. He figures it’s a street clothes kind of meeting, but he’s still at the train station with a minute to spare, skidding to a stop in front of her and almost sputtering at the sight.

This is the first time he’s actually seen Felicity, in person, since the shooting. But it’s not the wheelchair that’s breaking his heart, it’s the look on her face. Pure devastation, heartbreak laced with anger and melancholy, eyes red-rimmed behind her glasses. 

He tries to catch himself, realizing how his reaction must appear from the other perspective, but he’s never fast enough when it matters, 

“Don’t look at me like that.” Her voice is distant and ice cold.

“No, Felicity, it’s not…” She drops her stare to the ground after a long look that tells him nothing, and nothing good.

“Look, I don’t really have the time to do this right now, Digg and the crew are Arrow-less back in Star City, they’ll need me if something happens” she continues, matter-of-fact. “So I just need you to take me there.”

“Where?”

“To the house or the apartment or whatever.” She won’t meet his eyes, absently rolls one wheel of her chair a little, so she’s partly facing away from him. He realizes it the split-second before she speaks again. _She knows._ “Take me to William.”

He may have a promise, but he knows well enough not to lie and respects her too much to pretend. “How did you find out?”

“That doesn’t matter right now.” It’s awful to be standing over her at a moment like this, to watch her eyes well up behind her glasses, but he’s stuck, frozen in place like he can stop this timeline from unfolding if he tries hard enough. 

“Take me to the damn house, Barry.”

* * *

Felicity’s silent as he helps her into his car, her brain turning over and over on itself, trying to figure out what exactly it is that she’s supposed to be feeling right now. It’s maybe two minutes before Barry can’t take it anymore, breaking the silence with a nervous question, sounding like he’d take one of Oliver’s arrows in the back over this.

“How did you know I knew?”

“I didn’t really,” she admits softly. The betrayal twists the knife in her chest. “It was just a hunch.”

She’s sure Oliver talked him into this, and she’s put enough together to know that there was some kind of ultimatum on his end. The worst part of her rationale understands what’s happened here. Her Oliver, this new incarnation she’s known since their trip around the world, he wouldn’t have kept this from her, not if he had the choice.

 _But he did,_ says an ugly voice in her head that seems to be growing louder by the hour. _He did anyway. (“People don’t change.”) He didn’t trust you, didn’t trust that the two of you could have figured something out. (“Even if you want them to.”)_

When they stop at a red-light, Barry gives her a guilty looks that cuts away when his eyes drop to her hands. Only then does she realize she’s been worrying her engagement ring, twisting the diamond around and pressing it into the soft flesh of her palm.

“First time I’ve seen that in person,” he tells her softly. “The ring, I mean. It’s…impressive.”

“Yeah, it’s really something,” she responds, studiously keeping gaze eyes down so Barry doesn’t see her eyes fill with tears, even though her voice must give it away. “He said the other week that he wanted to get married as soon as possible, that he didn’t know what we were waiting for.”

He doesn’t respond, and she doesn’t really give him the time, taking in a breath in that feels like it rattles her ribcage. “I think maybe…I think he just wanted to get it done before I found out.”

“That’s not it.” When Barry finally speaks, it’s almost convincing enough. But then the light turns green and he doubles down. “Felicity, you _know_ that.”

She can count the things she knows for sure on one hand right now. That’s not one of them.

* * *

They pull up a little ways down the street and he points out the house. “What’s the plan?” Fresh guilt tears through him when he realizes that he doesn’t have to worry about her bolting from the car and knocking on the door. It’s true that he could have stopped her before, but it’s worse to know it like this.

“I don’t know.” Her answer is so low and wobbly, it’s like the words are coming from someone else’s mouth. Felicity Smoak doesn’t sound like that. She slumps a little in her seat, and he wonders if she’s also thinking about how little agency she has in this situation.

“Felicity, I don’t…” This time, she snaps.

“I don’t really have a _plan_ , Barry,” she interrupts, raising her voice like she’s scolding him. “I just thought maybe if I saw…”

Like the fates are playing a twisted prank, the front door opens at that moment, and William tumbles out in his Little League uniform, glove already on his hand. Felicity sits back up, choking on the end of her sentence, and Barry hears her gasp audibly when the boy’s close enough to see the resemblance. Samantha trails out after a few moments, carrying a duffle bag and a travel mug, but Felicity’s eyes are fixed on Oliver’s son until their minivan is out of sight.

When her words return, they’re like a whisper. “I just needed to see that it was real, I guess.” Barry reaches for her hand, the one with the ring on it, and she yanks it from his grasp. Right.

“You have to know that he wanted to tell you,” he persists. He’s done his own share of secret-keeping in the name of noble heroics, figures it has to pay off for some of them, some of the time.

“And what about you?” Felicity asks. Turns out, noble heroics are a lousy excuse when the person is staring you right in the face. “I thought you would at least…we’ve shared so much…”

He doesn’t need her to remind him. They’ve always understood each other in that way, known what it means to be just a little bit of an outcast, to wonder if having fewer people in your life said something about the love you had to give.

“That’s the point, Felicity, you know just as well as I do what it feels like to grow up without a father,” he tells her. His life may be consumed by more pressing concerns at the moment, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about what he’d say. He just thought he’d have more time, he should have known better than to underestimate her. “Oliver asked me to let him figure it out. He was backed into a corner.”

“I know I just…” her voice wobbles again on its way out and she takes a beat to try and compose herself. It’s hard to understand why she’s trying to hard to keep up appearances, but he doesn’t want to think about it, in case it has anything to do with why she won’t let him comfort her. “I’m supposed to be in that corner.”

“You are,” he tries to assure her, but it feels weak at this point, even to him. Her walls are up so high he can barely even see her behind them. “He wanted to tell you. He _would_ have.”

“I’m just not sure I believe that.” There’s a long moment where it feels like she might say more. But then she just gives him a long, sad look that ends on a kind of half-smile, one that doesn’t bring him any kind of warmth. “You can take me back to the train station now.”

He protests, even as he puts the car into gear. “Felicity…”

“There’s nothing to be done,” she announces, matter of fact once again. He knows she’s right, but it still feels wrong. “I have to get back to work, and so do you.”

Barry Allen has a lot of bad goodbyes at the Central City train station. But this one might break the record.

“Thanks for not lying to me,” Felicity tells him on the sidewalk near the front door. She’s right there in front of him, but it feels like an impossible distance. Like she said, nothing to be done.  “Just now, I mean. Sorry for showing up out of the blue.”

“I never lied to you, Felicity,” he says selfishly. That point’s important to him, it’s one of the only things that’s stopped him from drowning in guilt. “I’m sorry you found out like this.”

“Yeah.” She clears her throat. “Yeah, me too.” Then she turns and she’s gone, the brief moment when he helped her from the passenger seat will have to count as a goodbye hug.

She’s good on the chair, he thinks, realizing he should be unsurprised that it took her no time at all to master. She’s already wheeling her way through the automatic doors, and she barely looks back at him when he calls, “Bye, Felicity.”

* * *

_“Bye, Barry.”_

On the ride home she thinks about the past, about the girl who kissed Barry Allen on that train a little over a year ago. It’s unbelievable, how much her life – their whole world really – has changed since that little could-have-been, and it seems hard now to imagine a version of herself that thought it might.

But Barry’s betrayal doesn’t hurt any less than Oliver’s because of the way Felicity loves him. In some ways, it hurts more, because she had thought them one in the same. When he reached for her hand outside William’s house, she thought of a night last year, when things were bad with Henry, and Barry and Iris were on the outs. He had run all the way to her apartment, showed up exhausted, and soaking wet after bolting through a thunderstorm.

They sat on her couch and watched Netflix, some old British detective program his dad used to let him stay up late for, and when he started crying ten minutes in, she didn’t say anything, didn’t press for details. She just took his hand. Later, when he was ready to talk, she told him about the first time her dad helped her build a desktop computer from scratch.

Felicity knows that Barry kept this from her because of Oliver, but also because of William. More than that, she understands it. Because inside them both is a nine-year-old who can’t think of anything they wouldn’t give to have their father back.

When she gets home, it’s time to think about the future. The empty loft seems to echo the thoughts that bounce around in her brain as she realizes there are so many things to figure out now. How to tell Oliver she knows, how they keep everyone safe and then happy, how she’ll prevent a proven master of self-blame from imploding when he realizes the walls are coming down around him. This secret, it doesn’t really change how she feels about him. But she knows it might change what happens next.

Tonight however, before she has to face Oliver, Felicity has to face herself. She’s so exhausted, so burnt out from the day that she forgoes her usual bedtime routine – it’s harder solo, anyway – curling up on the couch. Before she drifts off to sleep, tears pricking at her eyelids, she takes off her glasses and, after a thought, her engagement ring, resting them both on the end table.

She looks at the diamond, and thinks of Moira Queen. How a woman she barely knew led Felicity’s life to this moment in more ways that she can even count. She had never noticed the ring on Oliver’s mother’s hand when she was alive – she’s not even sure she wore it after she got remarried – but she’s certain it looked beautiful. It looks beautiful everywhere: in the open velvet box with his smiling face behind it, on her finger when she kissed him in the back of a limousine, and now, resting on the table next to the couch in their empty apartment.

Maybe, in the morning, it’ll stay there.


End file.
